INDIANAPOLIS---The NCAA
Division I Men’s and Women’s Basketball Committees announced that they
will make public for the first time the official Ratings Percentage
Index (RPI) for their respective championships. The official RPI is
used as one of many tools to select teams to participate in the
championships. The first official RPI rankings are scheduled for
release on Thursday, February 2 and will include all games played
through Monday, January 30. Through the end of the season, the updated
RPI rankings will be found at www.ncaasports.com.

“One
of the committees’ primary objectives over the last few years has been
to increase the transparency and understanding regarding the process of
selecting teams for the tournament,” said Craig Littlepage, director of
athletics at the University of Virginia and chair of the NCAA Division
I Men’s Basketball Committee. “While the official RPI is a part of the
evaluation process, it is the subjective opinions formed by committee
members after countless hours of observation and discussion which are
central in the selection, seeding and bracketing process. Still, we
think that announcing the results of the RPI ranking on a weekly basis
has its benefits.”

The RPI,
developed in 1981 to provide supplemental data in the evaluation of
teams for at-large selection and seeding of the championship bracket is
only one of many pieces of information available to the committees.
Qualitative factors such as games missed by student-athletes or coaches
and a team’s performance in the latter portion of the season cannot be
reliably measured by a statistical model. However, such factors are
among the details of each team considered by the committees.

With
most of the 31 conferences that receive automatic bids to the men’s and
women’s championship beginning league play in early January, the
committees decided that releasing the RPIs later in the month would
make for a more meaningful reflection of each team’s season.

“We
chose this point of the season to release the RPI because the
composition of each team’s schedule is comprised of a blend of
non-conference and conference games,” said Joni Comstock, director of
athletics at American University and chair of the NCAA Division I
Women’s Basketball Committee. “Making the RPI ranking public is a new
concept; but what isn’t changing is our commitment to select the best
at-large teams available and constructing a balanced bracket for our
championships. The RPI is just one part of that process.”